EQUITIES
Foreigners buy NT$48.5bn
Foreign investors last week bought a net NT$48.5 billion (US$1.76 billion) of local shares after buying a net NT$19.53 billion a week earlier, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said in a statement yesterday. As of Thursday, foreign investors had sold an accumulated NT$454.09 billion of local shares since the beginning of last year, it said. Last week, the top three shares bought by foreign investors were United Microelectronics Corp (聯電), Innolux Corp (群創) and China Airlines Ltd (中華航空), while the top three sold were AcBel Polytech Inc (康舒科技), Kinpo Electronics Inc (金寶電子) and Walton Advanced Engineering Inc (華東科技), the exchange said. As of Thursday, the market capitalization of shares held by foreign investors was NT$24.44 trillion, or 43.48 percent of total market capitalization, it said.
SEMICONDUCTORS
CHPT revenue up 26.69%
Chunghwa Precision Test Technology Co (CHPT, 中華精測), a supplier of probe cards used for silicon wafer testing, yesterday reported that its revenue grew 26.69 percent annually to NT$423 million last month, the second-highest monthly sales figure in the company’s history. Customers were stockpiling 5G chips and market demand for high-performance computing chips rebounded, the company said. Last month’s figure boosted its fourth-quarter revenue 14.8 percent to NT$1.27 billion, from NT$1.11 billion in the third quarter. For the whole of last year, revenue edged up 0.78 percent to a record NT$4.24 billion from NT$4.21 billion in 2020.
SEMICONDUCTORS
TMC buys back 4.5m shares
Taiwan Mask Corp (TMC, 台灣光罩), a supplier of photomasks used to make semiconductors for silicon wafers, yesterday said it had bought back 4.485 million of its own shares over the past two months for NT$413 million. The number of repurchased shares accounted for 74.75 percent of the shares that the firm had planned to acquire on the open market to bolster its share price, TMC said in a regulatory filing. On Nov. 4, TMC began the buyback scheme, aiming to repurchase up to 6 million shares at NT$62 to NT$110 per share. The average repurchase price was NT$92.25, compared with the firm’s closing share price of NT$108 yesterday.
ELECTRONICS
Ichia’s annual revenue rises
Ichia Technologies Inc (毅嘉科技) yesterday reported revenue of NT$539 million for last month, an annual decline of 3 percent, due to a shortage of raw materials and the effects of inventory adjustments. Sales generated from flexible printed circuit integrated components reached NT$389 million last month, accounting for 72.17 percent of total sales, with the remainder coming from mechanical integrated components, it said. Despite the shortage of raw materials, Ichia reported consolidated revenue of NT$6.48 million for last year, up 17.73 percent from 2020 and the highest in three years.
STANDING HEAD
Microsoft releases e-mail fix
Microsoft Corp on Sunday offered a solution to a bug that caused some e-mail messages to become stuck on its Exchange platforms due to what it said was a New Year-related date-checking failure. The problem was not security-related, the company said in a blog post. A subsequent update gave two fixes, one that could be applied to all of a client’s servers and another that needed to be applied manually to individual servers. The bug caused messages to get stuck in transport queues on Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019, it said.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
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